Tomcat in Love (38 page)

Her tone took me aback. I wrapped the towel around my middle, secured it with a convenient clothespin, stood awaiting the next onslaught.

“Listen very closely,” she said. “I’ve done everything under the sun to please you, to make you
want
me. Coddled you. Filed for divorce, followed you down to Tampa, put the goddamned house up for sale. What a moron I’ve been! Stupid, stupid me—I even tolerated your whining about Lorna Sue. A bitch, by the way. Not half the woman I am. Not a
zillionth.
”

She shook her head as if stumped by the mathematics, as if nothing added up.

“I mean, seriously, it’s like you can’t even
see
me. Men think I’m dynamite. Heads pop up. I’m sexy and smart and … You don’t care, do you? You don’t. All this time together, you can’t even call me by my first fucking name. I think you’re
afraid
of it.” She bit down on her lower lip and studied me for several seconds. “You
are
, aren’t you? Afraid.”

I examined the puddle of iced tea at her feet. No sensible reply came to mind.

“Do it,” she said. “Start a sentence with
Donna
. Donna, I’m sorry. Donna, I wish I’d done better. Donna, we could’ve had a good life. Try it. Anything.”

I nodded—I did try—but my vocal cords went lax.
^*
The word
Donna
would not form itself. Whatever the cause, spiritual or biological, I could only gape.
^†

Mrs. Kooshof shut her eyes.

“Well,” she said.

Then a minute later she opened her eyes, smiled, and said, “Once you’re on your feet, Thomas, I just want …” She held up a hand. “Don’t say a word to me. Please. Just go.”

Her smile, of course, was not a smile. And the word
go
settled between us like a fog.

“You’re sure?” I said. “You really want it to end like this?”

“I never wanted
any
endings. I wanted good things.” She picked up her brochures, smiled brightly again—falsely. “That night you showed up here, I was so … Crummy town, crummy husband. Then I find this wacky guy lying there by the birdbath. Like out of a spaceship or something.”

“Captain Nineteen.”

“Captain Nineteen. And right away—
almost
right away—it felt like somebody gave me a chance. That’s all. A chance.” She closed her eyes, stepped backward, lifted her travel brochures as if to shield herself. “I mean, you’re not what I’d always dreamed about, not even close, but it felt … This incredible perfect Tightness. The funny things you say, the way … Look at yourself—that stupid dish towel. You can be cute, and you’ve got this good heart, and you’re intelligent and screwy and … If you could just stop trying so hard.”

“I’ll remember that. ‘Try not to try.’ ”

She started to smile again, but the smile failed. “Some things you
should’ve
tried. You should’ve tried me.”

“Right. No nerve.”

“You should’ve.”

She turned away. She left me there in the kitchen, alone, with a ruined robe and something sour in my throat.

“Donna!” I almost yelled.

O
n the second day of July, Herbie and Lorna Sue and her pretty-boy tycoon arrived in Owago for the holiday weekend. By chance—or more accurately, I believe, by a gift of fate—I was out for a stroll that afternoon, alone, and happened to see the big blue Mercedes pull up just before dusk: tycoon at the wheel, Herbie beside him, Lorna Sue hogging the commodious backseat.

I did not, of course, literally gasp.
^*
But I must say that the word instantly popped to mind, as if my brain had somehow done the gasping for me. My heart raced. I immediately sat down on a neighbor’s ill-tended lawn. It was one of those moments when the world
comes into stark focus, when all the emotional horrors of a lifetime are squeezed into a single amazing instant.

For weeks, of course, I had known they would be arriving, yet the prospect had always seemed an impossible fantasy, a pipe dream. Bear in mind, I had not laid eyes on these three blackguards since the day of my public spanking. The passage of time, however, had done nothing to eradicate that brutal incident from my memory. Night after night, hour upon hour, I had been picking at it like a scab: my bared haunches, the disgrace, the sting, the twinkle in Herbie’s eyes, the tycoon’s swiftly descending yardstick, Lorna Sue’s indifference, the whole multiplicity of injustices and fifth-column betrayals.

Now, at last, here they were. Delivered to me like cattle for slaughter.

I had been ordered to depart Owago that very evening, and it was therefore necessary to inform my balky host that I would be extending my stay by at least two full days.

On the surface, Mrs. Robert Kooshof did not take the news well. She strode in the direction of the telephone, threatening eviction, at which point I hastily rose up and unplugged the whole works. I looped the cord around my neck. I pulled it tight. “Two additional days,” I declared, “will harm no one.” (Strictly speaking, this was not the case. Immense harm, in fact, would surely be the lot of a certain triad of perfidious love villains. Last gasps, et cetera.)

“Two days,” I said, and winked. “I’m sure we can find ways to make the time fly.”

Mrs. Kooshof took the cord from my neck.

“All right, I can’t evict you,” she said. “But it won’t change anything. I really do want you to leave.” Then she paused and squinted. “What’s
happening
, Thomas? I can tell by that silly smirk of yours that something—”

“It is not a smirk,” I said crisply. “It is a Fourth of July twinkle.”

Well into the night, as Mrs. Robert Kooshof slept the sleep of the spent, I moved in stealth to the garage. Pulled out my seven mason jars. Topped them off with an inch or so of fresh gasoline.

Fuses, I reminded myself, remained a problem.

First thing in the morning, I would put my mind to the matter. A solution would be found.

For now: a bit of reconnaissance.

A trial run, if you will.

My plan, as hinted at earlier, was to issue a loud, fiery, unmistakable wake-up call—not to hurt but to scare, to vaporize that private bubble of theirs, to let them know I was a human being and not some game piece on the checkerboard of treachery. (Childish, you think? I think not. Keep in mind your impulsive, somewhat less than mature trip to Fiji: how you contemplated your own ferocious wake-up call. Except you backed off. You went chicken. And you regret it, don’t you?)

So, yes, a trial run, and it was with fluttery glee that I advanced in my ruined robe and corduroy slippers to the big yellow house on the corner.

No surprise to find the front door unlocked. Small town. Slovenly household.

Easy.

Down a hallway, up a flight of stairs. Little had changed: the scent of mildew and boiled cabbage. The same old clutter, the same icons and crucifixes and ceramic figurines of the Virgin Mary. I bit down on my lower lip, paused briefly in the second-floor corridor, then slipped into the first of three darkened bedrooms. Door number one: degenerate old Earleen asleep in her wheelchair, Ned and Velva in the moonlit bed beside her. Door number two: Herbie in his underwear. Door number three: imagine my grief.

Obsessed?

Time heals all wounds?

Look on the bright side?

Wish them well?

Get on with my puny little life?

Bygones be bygones?

You do not know what I know. You did not see what I saw. Lorna Sue slept with her left arm hooked around the tanned, narrow, naked waist of a male individual whose name I have vowed never again to utter, a faceless nonentity whom you have come to know (from afar) as “the tycoon.”

Face reality?

I certainly did.

I squatted down and inspected the vile tycoon from a distance of eight or nine inches. Handsome, yes. Yet hardly flawless. Even in the pale, curtain-filtered moonlight I could make out his graying nostril hairs, a vast crop of winter wheat swaying with each lucky breath. An incipient blackhead upon the nose. A bulbous, crunchy-looking Adam’s apple. Sadistic lips. The telltale stains of hair dye. A chipped incisor.

And beside him lay Lorna Sue—those dark eyelashes, that summer-brown skin.

My state of mind, like my heartbeat, was irregular.

Indeed, yes: I faced reality.

Much too real.

I looked away. Drew a breath. Looked back again. It was this odious conjugal scene that I had been envisioning for so many months, a slow torture of the imagination, but now the undeniable facts took on a much more banal, vulgar, and lasting substance.
^*
The girl of my dreams—my Juliet, my eternal Magdalene, my Lorna Sue—lay aboard a mattress
^†
with this hirsute, interloping primate. (Surely, in your own tortured daydreams, you must have pictured your ex-husband snoring in the arms of his cheap new redhead? And with sufficient courage, would you not do as I did? Creep into their little thatched hut by the sea? Crouch at bedside? Stare into the love grave? Pay heed to each pornographic detail?)

Live vicariously, then:

The house was far from silent. Echoes of history. Childhood voices. The incessant racket of my own thoughts.

I should have strangled the son of a bitch.

Obsessed?

What is love, for God’s sake, if not the most distilled obsession?

Yes, I should have plucked off his pistil, crushed his purply parts with the sleek volume of summer fiction splayed open on the nightstand. Instead, I sighed and stood up and moved to Lorna Sue’s side of the bed. Even in the humid dark I could not help shivering.

Tentatively, I reached down and placed the flat of my hand upon Lorna Sue’s bared left hip, holding it there to absorb her warmth. She did not stir. (How things change. In the old days the slightest touch would have awakened her.) She slept like an angel. No bad dreams, no second thoughts.

Reality?

Of course.

Yet none of it felt real. A breach of nature. Even the flesh at her hip had the texture of plastic, as if this were a facsimile of the real Lorna Sue, grotesque and artificial, and with a little shudder I yanked my hand away.

I may have moaned.

Again, there was some dead time. I noted the digital clock at bedside—3:33
A.M
. Later it read 3:55. Then 4:18. Briefly, I drifted off. Memories. Visitations. (It was a product of my imagination, perhaps, but at one point Lorna Sue seemed to sit up and take me in her arms. She repented. She promised a happy ending.) Thus, in such singular ways, I found it calming to while away those wee hours in the presence of my beloved ex-wife and her tycoon, to breathe their air, to appropriate their heartbeats, to share with them the fluid movements of the unconscious.